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| Michael Geoghegan keeps it simple at HSBC |
Last month, Euromoney held its annual Awards for Excellence dinner in London, presenting our global best bank award for 2009 to HSBC. Michael Geoghegan, group chief executive of HSBC Holdings, seized the occasion to deliver the speech that we reprint below in its entirety. It is a very good read. "Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure to be here and to accept this award on behalf of the 300,000 staff that work for HSBC in 85 different countries. We have certainly had an interesting time in our industry. And when you’re classified as the best bank in the world, the global bank, the number one brand, et cetera, et cetera, and then, in the next breath, you’re told: ‘You’re too big too fail’, what will happen to you?
"Well, let me tell you what does happen at HSBC. We are a bank that runs on very simple principles. We run on the philosophy that, in fact, banking is very boring. It’s about a sum of a certain number of things that you do constantly around the world, 365 days of the year.
